Coppola’s Film Is A Visual Treat

Cpl. John McBurney (Colin Farrell) seems like a goner. Huddled against a tree in the dense woods of Virginia, he is bleeding out from a gunshot wound below his left knee while the Civil War rages around him. Then an 11-year-old girl named Amy finds him while she is picking mushrooms — their relatives will eventually play a fatal role in the story — and helps him to her home, Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies.

“Any men about?” McBurney asks — call me John, he tells the ladies later — and the astonished looks on seven female faces give him his answer. Because Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman, stern and in control) has drawn her one teacher, Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), three young girls and one teenager, Alicia (Elle Fanning), into a hermetically sealed world. Here they garden and cook and conjugate French verbs, oblivious to the war outside their gate. Men? No, only the injured Yankee soldier now confined to a bed behind the locked door of the music room.

Miss Martha says it is the “Christian thing” to help John heal. She plucks the lead from his injured leg calmly, then stitches his wounds like an expert at needle work. But when she must give him a sponge bath, she can hardly breathe and must take several breaks to regain her composure. No wonder then that when a band of Confederate soldiers passes by the house, she sends them on without mentioning the Yankee soldier convalescing in her house.

John shows off both Farrell’s movie-star charisma (he has never looked handsomer) and his more aggressive, frightening side. As he grows stronger, John insinuates himself into everyone’s good graces. He’s a courteous make-believe uncle to the younger girls, a bad boy for the panting Alicia and a tortured man for Martha and Edwina, to whom he pours out his sins: An Irish immigrant, he joined the army for the money and deserted when he was injured. Now he offers to help maintain the school — it’s dilapidated after years of neglect — in exchange for a home.

As John plays up to the teenager and the older women, sexual tension builds and rivalries develop. The girls frolic and dance, the women begin dressing up for candlelit dinners where John sits at the head of the table, a paterfamilias drinking red wine and brandy. Of course this cannot go on, something’s got to give; and when it does we are shocked, yet surprised at the controlled gentility of the ending.

Sofia Coppola’s is not the first movie treatment of Thomas P. Cullinan’s lurid Southern Gothic novel: Don Siegel directed Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in a sweaty, overheated, sexist version that pleased critics but not audiences. Hers is mannered, dreamy, gorgeous to look at, like most of her films. Each frame is a carefully composed visual treat. Even the smoke and sounds of nearby battle are filtered through stands of tall pine trees, mellow in a yellowish light. (The movie won her the Best Director award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.)

“The Beguiled” would likely fail if Coppola had not nailed the ending. Martha sits at the dinner table, keeping her carefully maintained veneer intact, an image of female triumph over masculine aggressiveness, a victory for both her and Coppola’s vision.

“The Beguiled” is playing in wide release. It is rated R for some sexuality.